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Polls Say Bernie Is More Electable Than Hillary. Don’t Believe Them.
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Race
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Contributor | RP |
Last Edited | RP Apr 26, 2016 02:25pm |
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Category | Editorial |
Author | William Saletan |
News Date | Tuesday, April 26, 2016 02:10:00 PM UTC0:0 |
Description |
Trailing in the Democratic presidential race, Bernie Sanders has one last gambit. He wants to persuade the party’s superdelegates—officeholders, luminaries, and party officials who can vote at the convention—that he’s the Democrats’ best hope to win the general election. Never mind that Hillary Clinton has won more votes and elected delegates. “There are a lot of delegates out there who are looking at the general matchup,” Sanders argued Sunday on CNN. “And what they’re seeing in polls is that Bernie Sanders is running a lot stronger against Donald Trump than is Hillary Clinton.”
It’s true that Sanders does better than Clinton in hypothetical matchups against the Republicans. Currently, Sanders outperforms Clinton by more than seven percentage points against Trump, and by nearly nine points against Ted Cruz. But that’s not because Sanders is the stronger nominee. It’s because Republicans haven’t yet trashed him the way they’ve trashed Clinton. Once they do, his advantage over her would disappear.
The best way to account for this kind of damage is to conduct a campaign within a poll. That sounds perverse, but campaign pollsters, unlike media pollsters, do it all the time. It’s called message testing. |
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